Family Policy is an Investment in People

Family is the core unit of society and a space for the creation of human potential. Its prosperity is the paragon of sustainable development of our society in areas including not only culture and social and economic affairs, but also encompassing the educational and emotional aspects of the endeavour. A functional, stable family thus stands out as one of the pillars of society’s overall social cohesiveness.

However, for all the indispensable functions of the family in society as a whole and for the individual in particular, this society has failed to create a favourable pro-family ambience. Should this unfavourable state of affairs persevere, the absence of a functional family would threaten the very survival of our society. Insufficient support for the family is largely responsible for the demographic slump that erodes inter-generational solidarity, accelerates the ageing of population and could lead to a radical civilizational change.

No miraculous or fast solution is on offer due to the current state of public budgets and the severely underrated role of family policy, at the moment. However, the incumbent government has sent a strong signal that it means business when it comes to families. It has promoted a range of measures to improve the economic situation of the families, including a gradual increase of tax reliefs for a second, third and subsequent child, the introduction and subsequent increase of tax rebates concerning a child’s placement in the nursery school, and cutting the VAT on indispensable baby formula. Families can also benefit from the institute of child groups.

These steps, alongside other growth-stimulating measures taken, have helped to significantly spur domestic demand and restart the nation’s economy. At the same time, unemployment dropped significantly and wages were rising. It is also good news for working parents.

However society remains indifferent to the family needs in many respects. Due to the insufficiently transparent welfare state, the cohesive element of mutual responsibility is willy-nilly disappearing from the state, and with it goes the cohesiveness of generations. The primal immediate relationship between the parents and children has been replaced by a system of state-supervised redistribution of social and health insurance. In this way, the state redistributes the benefits it gets in the form of educated children and high insurance returns for that to pensions and health care, leaving families with all their chores and expenses minus compensation. The creation of human capital in the form of educating the next generation and fulfilling all other functions of the family therefore do not meet material and financial rewards, something which puts families with children at a decisive disadvantage against the rest of the population.

In order to at least partly alleviate the situation, the government is planning measures to enhance the input value of working parents in the pension system with the application of grading insurance payments according to the number of children raised. This might also help improve the economic standing of families and ensure more equitable conditions for families with children in the system of tax and social benefit redistribution. The battle is not over by a long shot, though, and a fierce showdown is expected.

Families also suffer from a restricted offer of flexible and part-time jobs, which are common in most of the advanced world. Not only mothers, but fathers too, should be allowed more time to attend to the education and development of their offspring. But few of them can actually afford to do that in view of the meagre compensation of the child-rearing costs on the part of the State and the public insurance systems.

The government should work to create a more favourable general societal atmosphere and conditions, remove the barriers and social pressures to which families are exposed to the point of losing their functions. It should work to better accentuate the importance of marriage and stable family for the harmonious life of parents and for the sake of quality upbringing as well as the generally unproblematic functioning of society.

It should be noted in this context that family policy and social policy are not bedfellows. While social policy “tackles a problem”; pro-family policy is an investment in the nation’s human capital. Consequently, the pro-family policy should not focus solely on the protection of low-income households, but it should consciously pursue the protection of families with medium to higher incomes as well. With a minimum or no support at all, these families shoulder all expenses in full and as the result their disposable incomes approximate those who get support from social systems on account of their low incomes.

Therefore a clear line of distinction should separate family policy from the social and pro-employment policies and the former should be geared in support of the functional family and fair appreciation of and adequate compensation for its contributions to society. It will be necessary to pay proper attention to the appreciation of domestic labour and the parents’ expenses in connection with the bringing up of a future generation.

The road to tackling these problems should be paved by a new approach to the family policy, coined by the Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs in conjunction with the expert commission on family policy. Its draft text is a working one as yet, but given the way it was formulated and filled with content, it poses more questions than answers to the problems outlined and deserves justified criticism from experts and the media. Deputy Prime Minister Pavel Bělobrádek has therefore asked Premier Bohuslav Sobotka to halt the preparation of this document and see to it that a brand new concept is formulated. But it’s another story. Ale to už vydá na další téma.